Smearing those who challenge Israel

[faceless]

Smearing those who challenge Israel
Johann Hari
8 May 2008
www.independent.co.uk

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, "Honest Reporting" will say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: "Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal." If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while "individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project". Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein's mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

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I remember having sharp issues with some of what Hari has said in the past, but I think this is a fine article. Maybe he has to learn how to dance between the shadows a bit better in order that he doesn't give ammunition to those loud-mouths who refuse to see anything other than black-and-white.

[nekokate]

Ya, this was a great article. Hari strikes me as just as much a conviction journalist as GG is a conviction politician. The fact that Hari and George don't see ey-to-eye is disappointing, but I guess he has to report the way he sees things, that's the only honest way forward.

It often amazes me how people are smeared just for saying things as they see them. If you're left-wing and you demonstrate in support of Palestine this is apparently obvious anti-Semitism, so how come I fit that description yet have Jewish friends and totally love Jewish culture? It seems like so many people are automatically put into categories with no chance of overlap, and that's a completely unrealistic way of rationalising things.

[faceless]

You;'re right there Kate, it must be tough going for those left-wing Jews especially. Being called traitors simply because they have the intelligence to see through the bullshit.

Here's a report about one Israeli who will no doubt be on a fair few maniacs' hitlist because of his treachery.


SOURCE

Sounds like Professor Sand would make a great guest on the Galloway show.

[major.tom]

I heartily agree. That was a fascinating article.

[faceless]

This image puts the problem in perspective.

[mickyv]

If there really is a smear campaign to try to silence the critics of Israel, it isn't working
Call those who disagree with you ‘witch-hunters’ often enough and they will see you as one in turn
Howard Jacobson
10 May 2008
The Independent

I wonder if I might take robust issue with an article my fellow columnist Johann Hari wrote last week, in which he complained about a "campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people". In so far as he feels it personally, I sympathise with him. It is infuriating to be contradicted when you know you're right, or to have your motives impugned, or to be in any way misrepresented, no matter that you are well equipped to handle your detractors.

I would be surprised, though, if he, or anyone else, is the victim of anything so concerted as a "campaign". Some of those he cites in evidence of his charge – Melanie Phillips, for example, and Alan Dershowitz – don't hunt in packs. It is impossible to conceive of either as being subject to co-ordination, or acting in that spirit of group solidarity which the word "campaign" implies. There are many reasons why two individuals, or indeed a hundred individuals, might think similarly, one of those reasons being that they are right to think so. This is one of the dangers of arguing that you are the victim of a campaign – it opens you to the suspicion that what feels like a campaign to you is simply a number of people finding the same fault with what you've said.

That isn't a case I want to make against Johann, whom I find thoughtful on the subject of Israel, even when I don't agree with his conclusions. I do, however, think he is mistaken in this instance – mistaken tactically and in fact – to invoke the spectre of a campaign, a front mobilised with aforethought to defame anyone who speaks ill of Israel. Indeed, accusing your detractors of carrying out a campaign often amounts to carrying out one in return – for it is a smear in itself to accuse people who disagree with you of acting out of no other motive than malice. He who says I smear him when I don't smears me.

Something else doesn't feel quite right to me about Johann Hari's unearthing of this "campaign", and that is his assertion that "it is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree it works". To my ear, that answers intimidation with intimidation, since it impugns the intellectual honour of those of whom he speaks, and coerces us into thinking the worst of them.

Furthermore, it is patently untrue that "intimidation" has worked. Johann himself is demonstrably not intimidated. Nor is it easy to see who else is. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it cannot surely be argued that the Palestinian case is not heard. Let's put it this way: if there really is a smear campaign in operation to intimidate and silence those who try to describe the plight of the Palestinian people, it isn't working.

That describing the plight of the Palestinian people is not the same as alleviating it I entirely agree. There are times when the to and fro of paper argument between commentators feels obscene, while the suffering continues. And I find it as unforgivable as Johann finds it that anyone should minimise the hell in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now live. But how a thing is does not always tell the story of how a thing came to be, and this is why the arguing must go on. Johann is right to object to any attempt to close down discussion, but call those who disagree with you "witch-hunters" often enough and they will at last see you as a "witch-hunter" in turn.

The reason for the virulence of some of the attacks Johann describes is not hard to locate. He finds the smearing of Israel's critics loathsome; others find the smearing of Israel loathsome too. I know – neither side will have it that "smearing" is what's going on. But until all parties take responsibility for their partisanship, the conflict on paper, like the conflict in the disputed territories, will go on with undiminished hatred. The week before last, Johann Hari wrote about the systematic defilement of Gaza by the Israeli army. I have no idea if this is true but I do not accuse him of fabrication. I have been to Israel. I saw with my own eyes the brutality of which a country that's been at war every hour of its life is capable. I talked to settlers whose language was so abhorrent I'd have pulled their settlements apart with my bare hands. But that's not where the story begins or ends. I also met Zionists whose passion for Israel was not remotely imperialistic or Jew-centred and whose humanity remained undimmed by bloodshed and by slander.

It didn't help Johann to convince those who didn't want to be convinced that in the middle of his reporting on the defilement he perpetrated falsenesses, or falsely emphasised, or offered as self-evident historical truth events which are subject to intense controversy. He cited, as many cite, the catchphrase "a land without people for a people without land", though that was not a formulation of Israeli making or even general Israeli belief. It was coined by the British before Zionism existed and didn't answer to the hopes for Arab/Jewish co-operation which early Zionists, perhaps naively, entertained.

In support of his assertion that Palestinians were forcibly and by deliberate pre-arrangement evicted in 1948, Johann adduces the conclusions of the historian Ilan Pappé – something of a believer in campaigns and conspiracies himself, a man whose work has been questioned at every turn, not least by historians on whose findings he has drawn. Johann can if he so desires make Pappé his historian of choice. But there are problems of context and attribution with his history, in this case an immoderate rhetoric of blame, a refusal to consider the circumstances in which peoples are moved, not simply as a matter of temporary expediency but in response, in the heat of battle, to a similar ambition on the other side. When you are threatened with rather more than eviction yourself, you do not always act with probity.

Pappé is as a red rag to a bull to pro-Israeli intellectuals, as Johann must know. Cite his version of history alone and it is disingenuous to be surprised when those who with fair reason read events differently turn angry. This has been a long war, fought brutally on both sides. No, the Palestinian case must not be silenced. But nor must the Israeli. And it won't do to cry foul when you're censured for silencing the one in the act, however humanely, of publicising the other.

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Is Howard Jacobson making a fair point against Hari, or is he slyly defending Israel & rubbishing Hari ?

Personally I think the latter.

[major.tom]

I agree, MickyV. It's like Microsoft's argument they they can't be a monopoly due to the presence of Linux. Just as Linux has excelled in spite of M$, those who defend the rights of Palestinians do so in spite of the ire they face.

@faceless: thanks for posting the map of Palestine -- best one I've seen for a while. The heading does belie a point of view, though, doesn't it? ("in dispute" = Israel says "it's mine" -- international law says otherwise)

One statistic that is missing are the demographics of the land. I recently watched a BBC documentary called "The Birth of Israel" which stated that at the time of the U.N. proposal to a 44% Arab / 56% Jewish split of the land, Arabs outnumbered Jews 2:1. (at 20:38 into the program)

[harry perkins]

[faceless]

Anti-semitism - Q&A
by Uri Avnery
(Uri Avnery is a German-born Israeli journalist)

Is everybody who criticizes Israel an anti-Semite?

Absolutely not. Somebody who criticizes Israel for certain of our actions cannot be accused of anti-Semitism for that. But somebody who hates Israel because it is a Jewish state, like the Hungarian in the joke, is an anti-Semite. It is not always easy to distinguish between the two kinds, because shrewd anti-Semites pose as bona fide critics of Israel's actions. But presenting all critics of Israel as anti-Semites is wrong and counter-productive, it damages the fight against anti-Semitism.

Many deeply moral persons, the cream of humanity, criticize our behavior in the occupied territories. It is stupid to accuse them of anti-Semitism.

Can a person be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite?

Absolutely yes. Zionism is a political creed and must be treated like any other. One can be anti-Communist without being anti-Chinese, anti-Capitalist without being anti-American, anti-Globalist, anti-Anything. Yet, again, it is not always easy to draw the line, because real anti-Semites often pretend just to be "anti-Zionists". They should not be helped by erasing the distinction.

Can a person be an anti-Semite and a Zionist?

Indeed, yes. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, already tried to enlist the support of notorious Russian anti-Semites, promising them to take the Jews off their hands. Before World War II, the Zionist underground organization IZL established military training camps in Poland under the auspices of the anti-Semitic generals, who also wanted to get rid of the Jews. Nowadays, the Zionist extreme Right receives and welcomes massive support from the American fundamentalist evangelists, whom the majority of American Jews, according to a poll published this week, consider profoundly anti-Semitic. Their theology prophesies that on the eve of the second coming of Christ, all Jews must convert to Christianity or be exterminated.

Can a Jew be anti-Semitic?

That sounds like an oxymoron. But history has known some instances of Jews who became ferocious Jew-haters. The Spanish Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, was of Jewish descent. Karl Marx wrote some very nasty things about the Jews, as did Otto Weininger, an important Jewish writer in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Herzl, his contemporary and fellow-Viennese, wrote in his diaries some very uncomplimentary remarks about the Jews.

If a person criticizes Israel more than other countries which do the same, is he an anti-Semite?

Not necessarily. True, there should be one and the same moral standard for all countries and all human beings. Russian actions in Chechnya are not better than ours in Nablus, and may be worse. The trouble is that the Jews are pictured and picture themselves (and indeed were) a "nation of victims". Therefore, the world is shocked that yesterday's victims are today's victimizers. A higher moral standard is required from us than from other peoples. And rightly so.

Has Europe become anti-Semitic again?

Not really. The number of anti-Semites in Europe has not grown, perhaps it has even fallen. What has increased is the volume of criticism of Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians, who appear as "the victims of the victims".

The situation in some suburbs of Paris, which is often cited as an example of the rise of anti-Semitism, is a quite different affair. When North African Muslims clash with North African Jews, they are transferring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to European soil. It is also a continuation of the feud between Arabs and Jews that started in Algeria when the Jews supported the French regime and Muslims considered them collaborators of the hated colonialists.

Then why did most Europeans state in a recent poll that Israel endangers world peace more than any other country?

That has a simple explanation: Europeans see on television every day what our soldiers are doing in the occupied Palestinian territories. This confrontation is covered more than any other conflict on earth (with the possible exception of Iraq, for the time being), because Israel is more "interesting", considering the long history of the Jews in Europe and because Israel is closer to the Western media than Muslim or African countries. The Palestinian resistance, which Israelis call "terrorism", seems to many Europeans very much like the French resistance to the German occupation. It can be argued that the conflict stretches far beyond the Israeli/Palestinian borders and affects many aspects of peoples lives not involved in the conflict in anyway.

What about the anti-Semitic manifestations in the Arab world?

No doubt, typically anti-Semitic indications have crept lately into Arab discourse. Suffice it to mention that the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" have been published in Arabic. That is a typically European import. The Protocols were invented by the secret police of Czarist Russia.

Whatever inanities may be voiced by certain "experts", there never was any widespread Muslim anti-Semitism, such as existed in Christian Europe. In the course of his fight for power, the prophet Muhammad fought against neighboring Jewish tribes, and therefore there are some negative passages about the Jews in the Kor'an. But they cannot be compared to the anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament story about the crucifixion of Christ that have poisoned the Christian world and caused endless suffering. Muslim Spain was a paradise for the Jews, and there has never been a Jewish Holocaust in the Muslim world. Even pogroms were extremely rare.

Muhammad decreed that the "Peoples of the Book" (Jews and Christians) be treated tolerantly, subject to conditions that were incomparably more liberal than those in contemporary Europe. The Muslims never imposed their religion by force on Jews and Christians, as shown by the fact that almost all the Jews expelled from Catholic Spain settled in the Muslim countries and flourished there. After centuries of Muslim rule, Greeks and Serbs remained thoroughly Christian.

When peace is established between Israel and the Arab world, the poisonous fruits of anti-Semitism will most probably disappear from the Arab world (as will the poisonous fruits of Arab-hating in our society.)

Aren't the utterances of the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Muhammad, about the Jews controlling the world, anti-Semitic?

Yes and no. They certainly illustrate the difficulty of pinning anti-Semitism down. From a factual point of view, the man was right when he asserted that the Jews have a far bigger influence than their percentage of the world's population alone would warrant. It is true that the Jews have a large influence on the policy of the United States, the only super-power, as well as on the American and international media. One does not need the phony "Protocols" in order to face this fact and analyse its causes. But the sounds make the music, and Mahathir's music does indeed sound anti-Semitic.

So should we ignore anti-Semitism?

Definitely not. Racism is a kind of virus that exists in every nation and in every human being. Jean-Paul Sartre said that we are all racists, the difference being that some of us realize this and fight against it, while others succumb to the evil. In ordinary times, there is a small minority of blatant racists in every country, but in times of crisis their number can multiply rapidly. This is a perpetual danger, and every people must fight against the racists in their midst.

We Israelis are like all other peoples. Each of us can find a small racist within himself, if he searches hard enough. We have in our country fanatical Arab-haters, and the historic confrontation that dominates our lives increases their power and influence. It is our duty to fight them, and leave it to the Europeans and Arabs to deal with their own racists.

--------------

I found this on that Irish Republican site I linked to the other day - it seems the perfect answer to those rabid maniacs who throw accusations of anti-semitism...

[major.tom]

One minor point with which I do take issue is:

[faceless]

[faceless]

Anti-Semitic? Not me, says Roger Waters
Pink Floyd star responds after Jewish group criticised his use of Star of David
By Lewis Smith
4 October 2010
The Independent

Thirty years after being forced to fight off claims he was corrupting children with Pink Floyd's The Wall album, Roger Waters has been driven to defend himself from allegations of anti-Semitism. The bassist has launched a vigorous defence of his views and music after being accused by an American-Jewish rights agency of using images in his stage show that promoted stereotypes.

During a performance of "Goodbye Blue Sky" at the US leg of The Wall Live tour, which revives Pink Floyd's hit 1979 album, a B52 bomber projected on to a backdrop is shown dropping symbols including the Star of David and a dollar sign, as well as a crucifix and logos for Shell and Mercedes.

Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said using the dollar sign and the Star of David in sequence echoed the stereotype that Jews were avaricious. Referring to criticism Waters has previously made of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, Mr Foxman said the musician should have "chosen some other way to convey his political views without playing into and dredging up the worst age-old anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews and their supposed obsession with making money".

Waters, who was born in Surrey but has lived in the US for 10 years, said the slur was so serious he felt compelled to set the record straight in an open letter to The Independent.

"I watch the workings of politics here and particularly the Republican Party. They work with the axiom that you can tell as many lies as you want – and often the bigger the better – and eventually they will believed," he said. "If I don't respond people will see the story and will come to believe I'm anti-Semitic, and I'm not. Nothing could be further from the truth. "

The images he chose to project during the show were selected because they are "representative of religious and national and commercial interests, all of which have a malign influence on our lives and prevent us from treating each other decently".

Waters has spoken against Israeli policies and accused the ADL of painting critics as anti-Semitic. "It's a screen that they hide behind. I don't think they should be taken seriously on that. You can attack Israeli policy without being anti-Jewish," he said. "It's like saying if you criticise the US policy you are being anti-Christian. I'm critical of the Israeli policy of occupying Palestinian land and their policy of building settlements, which is entirely illegal under international law, and also of ghettoising the people whose land they are building on. "It's that foreign policy I'm against. It's nothing to do with the religion."

Waters, who will bring his concert tour to Britain next year, said in his letter the symbols projected during the performance of The Wall were intended to show the suffering caused to ordinary people by war. The bassist pointed out, however, that there are many people in Israel who agree with his position and that he has had received a lot of support from Jews. He said: "There is a large movement inside Israel, young, Jewish Israeli citizens, and old ones too, who are against their government's policy in the same way as in England when Tony Blair took us to war against Iraq on the coat-tails of George Bush.

"I've had an extraordinary response. We've had over 1,000 comments on my Facebook page. "They are all extremely supportive. A lot of the comments I've had have been from Jews."

His letter to 'The Independent'

Dear Sir

In a recent news item on Foxnews/online, subsequently abridged in The Evening Standard, Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, (Anti Defamation League) in the USA , accuses my new production of The Wall and by implication me, of anti-Semitism.

A serious charge that demands a response. Had Mr Foxman come to my show before passing judgement and commenting publicly he might, I hope, have held his peace, as there is no anti Semitism in The Wall Show. The song to which he refers, Good Bye Blue Sky, describes how ordinary people, military and civilians alike, suffer trauma in the aftermath of war.

The visuals that accompany the song show waves of B52 bombers dropping various symbols from bomb bays on a war ravaged landscape. The symbols are: in no particular order, a Crucifix, a Hammer and Sickle, a Star of David, A Crescent and Star, a Mercedes sign , a Dollar sign, and a Shell Oil sign.

Mr Foxman's concern was that potentially the juxtoposition of a Star of David and a Dollar sign might incite hatred of Jews. Contrary to Mr Foxman's assertion, there are no hidden meanings in the order or juxtaposition of these symbols.

The point I am trying to make in the song is that the bombardment we are all subject to by conflicting religious, political, and economic ideologies only encourages us to turn against one another, and I mourn the concommitant loss of life.

In so far as The Wall has a political message it is to seek to illuminate our condition, and find new ways to encourage peace and understanding, particularly in the Middle East .

Incidentally, being from England, I had never heard of the ADL until today, but I have googled them and I see from their mission statement of 1913 that their brief is not only to defend the Jewish people from defamation, but also, and I quote, " to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens".

Perhaps we should all focus on that lofty ideal and stop cowering in our corners throwing stones at one another.

Roger Waters